Examinations
by pagerunner
Summary: What happens when I start thinking through logistics. Shepard quizzes Miranda about a few rather...personal medical issues, in the wake of her reconstruction at the beginning of Mass Effect 2.


Sometimes, Shepard thought, there just wasn't any way around the awkward questions.

Miranda kept asking her things without compunction, after all, after every mission: _How are you feeling? Any injuries to speak of? Any strains or difficulties? How about the shoulder?_ She was checking her work, Shepard knew, ensuring that all the Cerberus upgrades and rebuilds were holding up. And in between the physical assessments were all the sneaky little psych questions, testing to ensure Shepard's memory was up to par and her mind stable - and, probably, that she wasn't going too far off Cerberus' rails.

She really had to wonder how well she was testing on that scale.

As for basic health, of course, she was getting by. Shepard _felt_ normal enough, more or less; she didn't seem to be unexpectedly impaired in any way. But as for the subtleties, any shifts in personality…. well, even she had to admit that if she'd been changed too deeply one way or the other, she'd hardly be in the position to know the difference anymore.

So: "There's nothing really wrong," she told Miranda, during yet another debriefing in the operative's office, and tried to leave it at that.

"Good to hear," Miranda said. "Any… small differences at all, though? Even random thoughts you didn't expect - likes, dislikes, things that surprise you?"

For a long, wry moment, Shepard considered telling Miranda that _you know, I suddenly think I like women now. Like, in _that_ way. Like, how about you bend on over this desk of yours RIGHT NOW_, just to see her reaction. Of course, knowing Miranda, she'd probably take it in perfect stride.

So she sighed, thought about it, and wrinkled her nose. "There was one weird thing I noticed when walking through the mess," she admitted.

"Yes?"

"Suddenly I can't _stand_ the smell of cabbage."

Miranda almost laughed. "Well. _That_ I think merely proves that you have decent taste."

"If it had to get rebuilt from scratch, though, what do I have now? Your sense of taste?"

Miranda steepled her fingers and leaned on the desk, facing Shepard where she sat - which was, at this particular moment, as far away from said desk as she could get. "Well, let's see. How do you feel about… hmm… lemongrass chicken?"

"Tasty enough."

"Patavig bluefish?"

"Not sure I've ever had it."

"If you had, you'd remember. Plum wine?"

"Too sweet for me."

"You're insane," Miranda said calmly. "But it's your own brand of insanity, so I think it's safe to say you're in the clear."

Shepard sighed. She sat back in her chair and asked, "Just how _did_ you reconstruct me so completely?"

"Not easily, if that's what you're asking. We pored over every scan we could make of the remaining tissue, and every bit of information we could cross-reference. We compared your new brain scans against your old medical records, input from military profiles, mission logs, interviews, data trails, questionnaires from people who knew you…"

"Wait. You gave people personality quizzes about me?"

"Mr. Moreau was an excellent resource," she said, sounding in that moment uncannily like EDI. "He could always help with checks and balances. Mostly by calling us idiots or worse if we ever steered wrong, of course, but even that had its uses."

Shepard thought of Joker telling Miranda off, and couldn't suppress a smile. Still, picturing that whole reconstruction process in too much detail….

"I can't imagine what that must have been like," she said. "For him especially, but even you. That's awfully up-close-and-personal to get with a corpse."

Miranda shrugged. "You're taking it quite calmly yourself, seeing as you're speaking _of_, well, yourself."

Shepard uneasily ran her fingertips over the opposite palm. "Well, I… did miss all of the fun parts."

"Indeed." Miranda paused. "To be honest, for quite some while, the project was still rather… abstract. You were rebuilt from the inside out, of course, system by system. Facial reconstruction was the very last thing. It's why your scars weren't yet healed when we woke you. It did afford a little… psychological distance."

_A conveniently faceless corpse, then,_ Shepard thought, shuddering at what that must have looked like. Still, she could see Miranda's point. "I can't really blame you, I suppose."

"It still wasn't pleasant," Miranda said. "None of it was. But my feelings about it weren't the point. The point was getting you back, and in that, I'm quite pleased we succeeded."

Shepard wished she could be quite so confident herself. She _felt_ fine, certainly. She'd put herself through her paces on her own time, testing herself even more thoroughly than Miranda ever had. But there was one or two things she hadn't quite dared to… probe too deeply, just yet.

As it were.

Shepard sighed, rubbed her forehead and edged her way toward the point. "Just to confirm, is absolutely _everything_ fully functional?"

"Of course. Much of the base construction is new, as needs required, but it was built to your exact specifications. We ran into a few early hitches - like with your right shoulder, the one that's giving you trouble. I wish I could give you better treatment for that, but we simply don't have the equipment on board. Or anywhere, now that the station's been overrun." She briefly made a face. "If we'd had _time_, you would have gone through full diagnostics there, and further repairs and upgrades… but this is what we've got. Really, I'm pleased it's the only significant trouble spot. Other than that, yes. You're fully restored."

"Then… what exactly did you do about…reproductive health?" she said at last.

"Ah. Wondered when we'd get back to that." Miranda got up and walked around the table, taking her time at it. She seemed to be thinking things over as she did. "We did go over the basics early on…."

"Right - that I didn't have to worry about it. But what did that mean? I need specifics, Miranda."

"Fair enough." Miranda leaned against the desk, feet crossed. "The Illusive Man specified that every aspect of you be returned to a fully-functional state. Your reproductive system was included, and it's all tested as normal, although of course pregnancy would be the only way to fully confirm that _everything_ works. That, though, has been eliminated as a possibility for the time being. We're all aware that such a thing would be terribly inconvenient just now."

"Inconvenient," Shepard muttered. "That's one way to put it. So what did you do, put in an implant?"

"Of a sort. This is more sophisticated than what you likely had before. It's a small device that monitors and controls hormonal levels and eradicates any foreign cells, and it can self-adjust for changes in your body chemistry to keep things stable. I had it done myself - it's really quite unobtrusive. It can be disabled at any time, of course. Consider it as simple as an on-off switch."

Shepard shook her head. "Behold the cyborg baby-maker. Spawns on command..."

"You shouldn't think of it that way." Miranda gave her a look that might have been mistaken as a smirk. "After all, even with the device turned off, those babies still aren't going to appear without a little input in the old-fashioned way."

"You mean there's no… automatic dispenser built in, just to save everyone the trouble?"

"No. We'd never be able to maintain the sperm long enough."

Shepard stared. "I hope you realize I was joking."

"So was I," Miranda said. "Never play poker against me. Anyway, no, there's nothing else in there. You have a vivid imagination."

"Can't blame me for being paranoid." She looked down at her own torso, grimacing a little. "So how's it work? I mean… what if I _want_ to get pregnant? Not that I do, but..."

"You just take a pill. The appropriate chemical signal will revert the system."

"So I can't do anything about it until Cerberus gives me the right meds? Ones that I'm assuming only you can provide?"

"Yes."

"And you're not going to be doing that anytime soon."

"Priorities," Miranda said cooly.

A muscle in Shepard's cheek twitched. There were all sorts of implications to that, none of them good. "Forgive me if I say that sounds a little bit creepy."

"You just said you didn't want to get pregnant. By all measures, we did you a favor."

"I never asked for any 'favors' from Cerberus, believe me."

Miranda pushed herself upright again and walked back around to the opposite side of her desk. "No; considering you were _dead_ before we set about fixing that particular little problem, you weren't asking for much at all. I did have to make a few educated guesses on your behalf. Pardon me for assuming that morning sickness and an ungainly waddle wouldn't exactly benefit the day-to-day activities of the savior of the galaxy."

Shepard sighed. "You could have gone about this more conventionally, though."

"That would be less reliable," Miranda said, settling back into her chair. "You were rebuilt with state of the art technology throughout, most of it invented _for_ you, in fact, and I can personally attest to its efficacy."

"Is that why you're so concerned it all works?"

Miranda's lips tightened, just a fraction. "My reputation is on the line, yes. But I'm not too proud to think that every aspect of your resurrection was flawless. It was well-informed and carefully executed, based on all the information we could gather, and it's been thoroughly tested and verified in every way I could do so. But new information can still change the picture. So even now I'm continuing to build on the data about you to improve things wherever possible. A fault that rose from simple ignorance is what it is, but one that goes without an effort to learn and to correct the situation - _that_ is a failure."

Shepard's lip twitched. She couldn't really refute Miranda's approach. Still, it meant her continued health still did rest with one very particular person - or more to the point, one person and her even creepier superior - and that made the entire situation a tough pill to swallow.

No puns intended.

Shepard backed up to the topic that, ironically enough, suddenly felt like safer ground.

"This… particular birth control system, though," she went on, a little wearily. "You sound like you're already sure that it's fool-proof."

"It precedes the Lazarus Project, yes. Cerberus has always been dedicated on women's health issues - the overall state of humanity would be quite poor without it, after all. So yes, it's reliable."

"I feel ever so much better," Shepard said dryly.

"You might feel better yet if you tested it yourself," Miranda said. This time there was no mistaking the smirk. "There's no harm in a little healthy recreating, as it were. We're not on an Alliance ship, Shepard. The rules on fraternization are considerably less… archaic."

"I really hope you're not suggesting I go jump the first crew member I see."

"Of course not," Miranda said. "When and with whomever you may partner is entirely _your choice,_ after all."

_Very funny,_ Shepard thought, but this time she kept her mouth shut. At least until the inevitable follow-up question had to be asked. "Um, one… other… related thing."

"Yes?"

"If you were as thorough in reconstructing everything as you've said…." She thought through several ways to put it, discarded most of them, and gave up. "I'm not a virgin again, am I?"

There was a long enough pause to make her nervous before Miranda's lips twitched upwards again.

"You were restored to your last known state, Shepard. And given certain suggestions in your personal records, not to mention basic common sense, I did make sure to spare you that particular indignity."

_Personally re-deflowered by Miranda Lawson,_ Shepard thought, feeling certain her face was going red. _I might as well have propositioned her after all._ "Um. Thanks?"

"Any time, Shepard," Miranda said, with a smile that this time verged on the smug.

With that, Shepard decided it was well past time to beat her retreat.

She got out of Miranda's office and listened to the door shush shut with some relief. Outside, the crew was busy going about their duties, chatting, eating, occasionally flirting. Shepard felt briefly frozen in the face of it. She actually tried, for a small and embarrassing moment, to size a few of the men up and see if she got any… response. From herself, that was. But nothing worked. _I really hope they didn't pull any tricks with me,_ she thought, a little wearily. Miranda's assurances against tinkering notwithstanding, she really didn't trust Cerberus _not_ to make sure she was only attracted to certain types these days. Like, say, Jacob. _You know. Keeping the human line strong and all…._

She tried to shake the thought out of her head, which again worked less well than she'd hoped. And then she heard footsteps approaching.

The accompanying voices came clear before the two even came into view. One she knew well from long months of companionship; the other was quite new onboard the Normandy. But they were both unmistakable. Unaccountably, she found herself focusing on the sound more than she normally did: the resonance, the unique timbres, the deep richness when one of them unexpectedly laughed….

It went straight through every nerve she'd just been worrying about. Before Shepard had even _seen_ Garrus and Thane walking down the corridor, she'd had to start trying to make her sudden hand-brace against the wall look nonchalant.

_Oh, hell,_ she thought. _I may have been thinking about arousal on _purpose_, but… really?_

She blinked.

_Then again…._

They hadn't really noticed her yet. They were still talking, trading stories about past missions, and engaging in what almost sounded like a friendly game of one-upmanship. Given what she'd seen before of their respective skills, they could be at _that_ exchange for quite some while. Shepard pushed aside the details of the conversation, though, and simply _listened_. Maybe she'd just put herself into a mood, but the sound was suddenly the sexiest thing she'd ever heard.

…_.I guess that would be _one_ way to rebel, now wouldn't it,_ she thought, a little faintly.

"Ah, Shepard," Garrus said, noticing her at last. She dropped her hand back to her side and wiped the faint sheen of sweat off her palm. "We were just talking about you. I was telling Krios here about our _first_ encounter with the Dantius sisters - we were trying to tally up how many mercenaries they must have collectively employed. We did have to get rather a lot of them out of our way, didn't we."

"Quite the exercise in poor investments," Thane said, sounding subtly amused.

Shepard listened to that softly burring voice, looked longer than she should have at his lips, and made a small, involuntary smile of satisfaction. No, Cerberus had _not_ been tinkering with her where attraction was concerned - or at least her own personality was too perverse to let it stick. She wasn't sure which, but she'd take it as a good sign.

"All that money spent, and I got all the benefits," Shepard agreed, suddenly getting the idea she'd be enjoying the irony of this one for quite some time. "Never let it be said I can't take advantage of someone else's plan."

"That's my Shepard," Garrus said, with a reassuring grin.

_Quite possibly,_ she thought. _Well worth taking under my own examination, either way._

And when she walked away from Miranda's office with both of them in tow, she couldn't resist turning her head over that damned sore shoulder of hers, and giving the closed door a good long smirk of her own.


End file.
